Organic growth has softened. Purchase frequency has slowed. What to do? When pressed to innovate, many corporations have the same knee-jerk reaction: to hire people and spend money. They create cross-functional task-force teams and launch expensive, time-consuming market research studies, generating mounds of data, but to little effect.

As Head of Innovation and Digital Change at PwC Australia, Kate Eriksson specialises in digital and mobile technologies. Her vast international experience spans from start-ups to large corporates including Google, Facebook, Skype, Twitter and Ericsson.

Innovation is a hot commodity within brands these days; you need to up your game if you’re to compete with everybody else. Making sure you’re the first to explore cutting-edge technology on products requires a whole laboratory-style set up in order to do so: enter Levi’s Eureka Innovation Lab. Situated in the brand’s San Francisco birthplace, the lab is a research and development facility dedicated solely to the design ideation and prototyping of new Levi’s garments.

Disrupting. Everyone’s claiming to do it and oh how it’s grabbed our attention lately. In fact, at the moment, it is one of the most used, trendiest and overly stated buzzwords of recent years. To disrupt is to drastically alter or damage something. Applied to business, it translates to change and innovation.

In a recent TED Talk, Google’s Chris Urmson gave the world an insider’s look at how driverless cars see the road. It’s really mind boggling that this technology is anywhere close to working. For instance: Urmson’s self-driving system makes decisions approximately 10 times per second. That’s about 1,000 chances per mile to make a mistake – and to cause an accident

Disruption is an interesting topic for the same reason that cowboys, gangsters, and villains are interesting. It’s unpredictable. Problematic. Against the grain.

It’s kind of aging as a buzzword in the “education space,” but it’s other-worldly powerful, and there are few things education needs more. How exactly it produces change is less clear, but I thought I’d create a model to think about.

What if you could carry out a post-occupancy evaluation before your design is even built? That, in effect, is what I believe 3D gaming technology now enables us to do.

By creating a synthetic environment, your design model becomes a beta version published online for stakeholders and end users to explore in virtual reality. As they move through your design for a train station, hospital or other building, they can give you feedback you can use to improve the finished project – with changes at this stage costing much less than they would later in the process.

You can’t escape the reality that having the right environment for innovation means different things to different people. What we should be all able to agree upon is that the environment for innovation houses many of the conditions that connect innovation in people’s minds.

Since innovative developments in technology started changing virtually everything we do, the word disruption has been used more than ever.For established business models that have been around for decades, the threat of these new innovations has been responsible for their demise or for dramatically reducing their market share.

As the director of cyber programs at Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), Esti Peshin deals with large companies around the world in developing and deploying technologies to support cyber security. With a capability built up over many years in electronic warfare, the IAI found they were able to reapply that expertise in the field of cyber security.

The startup landscape can be a double-edged sword in the business world: either the company is going to disrupt the entire landscape or it’s going to inspire. But what seems to have corporations terrified is how to wrap their heads around the impact startups are having on the traditional model. Is internal research and development enough? Or is outside assistance needed? And just where should these corporations start?

“Innovation,” says Curtis Carlson, former president of Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and author of the classic book, Innovation(Crown, 2006), “is the primary driver of prosperity, job growth, social responsibility, environmental sustainability and national security.”

According to Millward Brown, Millennials spend an astounding 325 minutes daily using the Internet or apps: 172 minutes on phones, 60 minutes on tablets and 93 minutes on computers!

So how do retail and consumer products companies grow consumers’ brand preference in an age of digital distraction? Capture their hearts (and wallets) by curating unique, irresistible experiences and engaging in a dynamic and relevant manner.

Effective teaching is a continual work in progress. As educators, we adapt our practice each year to a new group of students, each of whom brings a unique blend of strengths, challenges, and experiences to learning. We adopt new curricula and apply new standards and mandates. We are always on the lookout for new approaches and strategies demonstrated by educational research to work in the classroom.

The next big leaps in technology are going to come from innovations in how we partner, collaborate and share ideas.

It's easy to think about innovation in our industry as measured by shiny new devices and apps that serve our every interest. And of course, these areas have seen fantastic advances in the last 20 years.

Apple is already looking at ways of radically changing the iPhone design, although we’re virtually certain that any big changes won’t occur this year. However, new glass technology developed by one company might come in handy if Apple is really serious about making radical changes to the iPhone’s iconic home button.

From the streets of Shanghai to Shenzhen’s technology incubators, to Beijing’s start-ups, innovation in China is thriving at a rate never seen before. The Chinese government plans to transform the nation into a global leader in science and technology, and has boosted research-and-development funding throughout the country.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

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Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.